Dirty Secrets

“Zack and Miri Make a Porno” and “I’ve Loved You So Long.”

In America, no frolic of innocence can last longer than its first gathering of hollyhocks. Just two weeks ago, the exuberant “High School Musical 3,” with its Albuquerque teens bursting into song and dance, opened in theatres as the latest incarnation of the old Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland musicals. Well, a new revelation is at hand. Kevin Smith’s comedy, the foul-tongued, bare-limbed “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” is another twist—God help us—on those cheerful M-G-M entertainments. Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks), friends since before high school, and now intimate but chaste roommates, are suffering through the chilly boredom of a Pittsburgh winter. Zack works in a Starbucks-like coffee shop; Miri appears to work at a mall. In any case, they can’t pay the bills, and the power and the water have been shut off. They need some money fast, and porn, they reason, has “gone mainstream,” so why shouldn’t they make some? Porn will turn the lights back on. Unlike the kids in the Rooney-Garland “Babes in Arms,” they have no particular talents, and only one of them is pretty to look at, but, for the sake of the movie, they will make out in front of the camera. To complete the cast, they hold auditions, gathering together a ragtag group of friends and strangers, along with a couple of babes in thongs from a local strip club. (Smith recruited the adult-movie pros Katie Morgan and Traci Lords for the job.) Then they start shooting, befouling Zack’s coffee shop after it closes its doors for the night.

The movie begins with church bells ringing in mournful disapproval of the filth that is about to be set before us. Kevin Smith, now thirty-eight, is the potty-mouthed boy from New Jersey who established himself as an apostate with “Dogma” (1999) and as a chronicler of the underemployed with such comedies as “Clerks” (1994), “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” (2001), and “Clerks II” (2006). His heroes are not so much slackers (they often have jobs) as they are unambitious, easily offended young men preoccupied with the small but furiously important issues of manners, respect, and hoped-for sex. Now that we’re in a recession, Smith’s turn toward entrepreneurial angst feels like the right idea, and the let’s-put-on-a-porn-show impulse is certainly promising. But I wish that Dionysus or Priapus or whatever god Smith prays to had made the movie funnier.

The name of the film shot at the coffee shop is “Swallow My Cockaccino,” which should give you some idea of the level of the movie’s wit. Porn, of course, depends on a parasitic relationship with the rest of the culture, high and low, and it is often close to spoof to begin with. (While taking a class on Melville forty years ago, I was disconcerted to see the title “Thar She Blows” on a local theatre marquee.) In Smith’s movie, the characters compete to come up with a title for their movie based on that of a regular feature film—“American Booty” and “Lawrence of A’Labia” are about as good as it gets—and there is a brief fantasia in which actors dress up as characters from “Star Whores,” but it’s more a costume party than an orgy. A lot of the comic ideas last for just a shot or two. When a complete sequence becomes necessary, Smith makes fun of the hapless mini-scenarios of porn—the delivery man at the housewife’s door, the sudden urge to unzip, the simulated joy. As a parodist, however, he doesn’t have much room for maneuver; he can only make silly material sillier. Gleeful to the end, he repeats his jokes over and over; some of the ideas must have been funnier to think about as minor outrages than they are to watch in a movie. His resources as a director are limited: the actors stand around in awkward clumps and grope each other clumsily. Smith got an R rating (rather than an NC-17) for his movie by making it lewd but never erotic—a classic American solution to the sex-comedy problem.

In the midst of the moviemaking scenes, Smith attempts a love story. Zack and Miri, who have huddled together as outsiders ever since they met, are actually crazy about each other but can’t admit it. Some of the rough, affectionate banter between Rogen and Banks is well written and well delivered. I must be getting used to Rogen. When he laid hands on Katherine Heigl in “Knocked Up,” I was seriously alarmed—the beauty-and-the beast coupling seemed a violation of the basic principles of romantic comedy. But, to my amazement, I thought that he and the even lovelier Elizabeth Banks made a nice couple. In only a few movies, Rogen has established a persona—the underachiever, the slob loser, but a guy who is articulate, and slightly self-disgusted, and who finally pulls himself together. The flab and the soft features have become part of his junior-Falstaff appeal. He can be cast as the guy who gets the beautiful girl because, underneath all his basso bluster and dirty talk, he’s a tender fellow. Staring in adoration at Banks, near the end of the movie, Rogen looks like a beatific bull.

Banks had a brief role as a girl ready for anything in “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” and, as Laura Welch in Oliver Stone’s “W.,” she takes a shrewd, appraising look at Josh Brolin’s George Bush—it’s the film’s best scene. This actress—reedlike, mobile, but always focussed—has a real sexual spark and so beguiling a smile that she can say obscene things and still seem fresh, and even classy. On the coffee-shop set, Zack and Miri make love for the first time (without undressing), and discover that they respond to each other. This moment of sexual awakening is meant to be overwhelmingly romantic, but, since lots of people are standing around idly watching, it comes off as somewhat less powerful than a Tristan-and-Isolde rapture. (I don’t think we’re meant to believe that they’re exhibitionists.) Kevin Smith turns out to be reverent after all: he wants to separate true love from mere copulating for money, but his story mixes romance and porn so inextricably that he seems confused, and the movie trips over its own conceits.

Kristin Scott Thomas’s elegant bone structure and slender frame make it hard to imagine her as a coarse-grained woman (though it would be fun to see her play one). She is an actress who suggests intelligence by not giving way to obvious emotions, and that taut withholding is part of her attraction—men, and women, too, want to pull her out of her shell. At times, she has hinted that something was seething underneath the beautiful mask: a struggle, perhaps, between desire and the need to maintain her soul in isolation. As Juliette, in the French film “I’ve Loved You So Long,” Scott Thomas is first seen in closeup, without makeup, her hair lustreless, her expression blank but tense. This time, she’s genuinely cut off, not just holding back. Juliette has recently completed a prison sentence of fifteen years for the unimaginable crime of murdering her six-year-old son. Her kid sister, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), a university professor in the city of Nancy, nervously gathers her into her own family, where Juliette remains in an uneasy state of semi-silence. The movie—which is the directorial début of the novelist Philippe Claudel, who also wrote the script—asks whether anyone who has done something so extreme can be welcomed back into a full human community. And does she want to be welcomed back? Scott Thomas wears a colorless print shirt and a brown skirt, and she carries herself as if she were still a prisoner. She lets a man pick her up in a bar, and, later, when he asks her if the sex was good, she offers a blunt “No, not at all.” Scott Thomas’s bleak self-sufficiency has never been more daunting or more fascinating.

“I’ve Loved You So Long” is one of those French movies which embed their characters in a robust bourgeois culture: a network of family, friends, and colleagues; a dailiness of cafés, cigarettes, and dinner parties. Difficult as Juliette’s situation is, Americans may be struck by how many chances she has for connection. Here, emerging from prison, she would likely be thrown into a much more severe and fragmented gray zone of indifference. Her sister, for one, ardently wants to break through to her and introduce her to people. Despite a big difference in their ages, Juliette and Léa were once close, and the movie is as much Léa’s story as it is Juliette’s. Claudel turns out to be very good at the psychology of intimacy. An observant man, he has assembled a large (and, to us, unknown) cast of actors around his star, and he dramatizes her slow reawakening with an infinite number of small, sharply etched details. But Claudel goes wrong in managing the nature of Juliette’s crime. When you find out, at the end of the movie, exactly what happened long ago, you feel a little cheated. But that error had the effect of making me want to see Kristin Scott Thomas’s performance all over again—you may need to see “I’ve Loved You So Long” twice in order to see it once. ♦

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